Academics in Germany say they've found a way to make Tor and similar onion networks more efficient and lower their latency. The crew at Ruhr University Bochum, Universität Wuppertal, and Paderborn University described their technique in a paper [PDF] this week accepted into next year's Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing …

Cisco has launched a single chip architecture that it claims will work well in network routing and switching gear, and manage data better than existing processors in both categories. At an event in San Francisco it called “Internet for the Future,” Cisco’s CEO Chuck Robbins said the new design – which the US tech giant is …

UpdatedChina's ambassador to Denmark has reportedly threatened to kill off a proposed free trade deal unless the semiautonomous Faroe Islands sign a deal with Huawei for 5G mobile network equipment. The explosive revelations were made by Berlingske, a Danish daily newspaper based in Copenhagen. The allegations are based on an audio …

It seems to come around quicker every year – the failure of so-called smart toys to meet the most basic of security requirements. Which? has discovered a bunch of sack fillers that dirtbags can use to chat to your kids this Christmas. Back in 2017, the consumer group found toys with security problems relating to network …

If you're an Oracle database user and are tempted to pay off a Ryuk ransomware infection to get your files back, for pity's sake, don't. The criminals behind it have broken their own decryptor, meaning nobody will be able to unlock files scrambled by the malicious software. This is according to infosec biz Emsisoft, which …

Black Hat EuropeElastic, the biz behind open-source search engine stack Elasticsearch, has launched its own SIEM – a somewhat counterintuitive thing to do, you'd think, until you look at how many others are using Elasticsearch for lucrative security products. For those not in the know, SIEM is short for Security Information and Event …

SponsoredWe seem to have been talking about IPv6 forever. It was officially launched in 2012 but had already been in existence for a number of years and had been implemented on all major operating systems used by businesses and consumers by 2011. Even before that date, it had been widely acknowledged that we were running out of IPv4 …

Amazon has officially accused President Donald Trump of pressuring the Pentagon not to award it a $10bn cloud contract because he hates its CEO Jeff Bezos. “President Trump's intervention… puts the very integrity of the government procurement process in question,” Amazon Web Services said in a formal appeal [PDF] of the …

re:InventThe advent of Outposts, Local Zone and Wavelength - released at AWS' Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas - amounts to a "new platform" that is now distributed rather than centralised, a company veep has told The Reg. Adrian Cockcroft, cloud architecture strategy veep, has been at AWS "about three years", though he is also well …

RoundupHello, welcome to this week's machine learning musings. We bring you news about the hottest topics in AI: Facial recognition, the so-called AI arms race between the US and China, and erm, GPUs in the cloud. US citizens won’t be subjected to facial biometric scans as they fly in and out of America, after all: The Department of …

China is reportedly using the 'cannon' capabilities of its massive domestic internet to try and take down anti-government websites in Hong Kong. The team at AT&T Cybersecurity reports that LIHKG, a forums and social news site being used to organize protests on the island, has been the target of an ongoing distributed denial of …

Cybercriminals will continue to exploit tried-and-tested fraud methods but also adopt a couple of new takes and targets in the year ahead. Predictions from fraud specialists at Experian suggest continued threats from careless use of public Wi-Fi networks. With ever more spots available, users need to be careful of what data …

A bug in the way Unix-flavored systems handle TCP connections could put VPN users at risk of having their encrypted traffic hijacked, it is claimed. The University of New Mexico team of William Tolley, Beau Kujath, and Jedidiah Crandall this week said they've discovered CVE-2019-14899, a security weakness they report to be …

Computer scientists from UC Berkeley, Texas A&M, and semiconductor biz SK Hynix have found a way to defeat secure enclave protections by observing memory requests from a CPU to off-chip DRAM through the memory bus. In a paper [PDF] titled, "An Off-Chip Attack on Hardware Enclaves via the Memory Bus," slated for inclusion in …

Patting itself on the back for blocking more than one trillion web tracking requests through its Enhanced Tracking Protection tech, Mozilla on Tuesday continued its privacy push with a further test of its Firefox Private Network service, an update to Firefox Preview Beta for Android, and the debut of its latest desktop browser, …

re:InventAt its re:Invent event under way in Las Vegas, Amazon Web Services (AWS) dropped the veil on a new tool to help customers to avoid spewing data stored on its S3 (Simple Storage) service to world+dog. "Access Analyzer for S3 is a new feature that monitors your access policies, ensuring that the policies provide only the …

As the sacred shopping season gets underway, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has issued a report detailing the privacy cost of surveillance-based commerce. Issued on the Monday after the US observance of Thanksgiving, a day so known for online shopping that marketers branded the event with its own commerce-promoting moniker …

Thanksgiving is an ideal time to either hack (IT admins need holidays too) or to drop news of hacks (because no one's reading much news) so here's your roundup of the weekend's shenanigans. In the past few days, researchers have disclosed breaches at mobile carrier TrueDialog, music streamer MixCloud, and Adobe's Magento …

PromoAs more and more organisations move to new technologies, data thieves constantly try to find ingenious new ways of penetrating even the most well-protected systems. If you’re an IT security professional keen to stay ahead of this ever-changing game, the place to fill any gaps in your security knowledge is SANS Institute’s …

SponsoredOrganisations are attacked every day: cybercriminals gain a foothold within the corporate network, and data is stolen and operations disrupted. The target of an attack could be your employer, a customer, a social media platform, or an intermediary responsible for secure access control, or financial record holding. So, who is …